Felicia's Journey
PENGUIN BOOKS
FELICIA’S JOURNEY
‘Felicia’s Journey
is a masterpiece, one of the finest novels from the contemporary writer I have no doubt at all is simply the best we have … you read and are dazzled by how good it is … It has also one of the most memorable and convincing, most sinister and terrifying of characters created in the modern world, a character of truly Dickensian proportions’ Susan Hill, speaking at the Whitbread Novel Award ceremony
‘A quietly passionate tale saturated in despair … Trevor’s language is spot-on … he is a compassionate, but stern and unforgiving judge’ Geraldine Brennan in the
Observer
‘This novel exhibits how emotional and psychological injury horribly incubates more injury … Trevor has never written with more humane energy and baleful bravura than he does in this elegy for unfortunates’ Peter Kemp in the
Sunday Times
‘There is always more in William Trevor than a finely crafted story. His uncanny use of detail is piercingly visual … the closing sentence brings from the reader a satisfied sigh’ Brian Masters in the
Literary Review
‘Masterly in its tension’ Thomas Kilroy in the
Irish Times
‘It is a mark of Trevor’s great imaginative resources that he opens deep chambers of horror without ever describing an act of violence’ Anthony Quinn in the
Independent
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Trevor was born in 1928 at Mitchelstown, County Cork, spent his childhood in provincial Ireland, and now lives in Devon. He attended a number of Irish schools and later Trinity College, Dublin. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters. He has written many novels, including
The Old Boys
(1964), winner of the Hawthornden Prize;
The Children of Dynmouth
(1976) and
Fools of Fortune
(1983), both winners of the Whitbread Fiction Award;
The Silence in the Garden
(1988), winner of the
Yorkshire Post
Book of the Year Award;
Two Lives
(1991), which was shortlisted for the
Sunday Express
Book of the Year Award and includes the Booker-shortlisted novella
Reading Turgenev, Felicia’s Journey
(1994), which won both the Whitbread and
Sunday Express
Book of the Year Awards;
Death in Summer
. (1998); and, most recently,
The Story of Lucy Gault
(2002), which was shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and the Whitbread Fiction Award. A celebrated short-story writer, his most recent collections are
After Rain
(1996);
The Hill Bachelors
, which won the Macmillan Silver Pen Award and the
Irish Times
Literature Prize; and
A Bit on the Side
(2004). He is also the editor of
The Oxford Book of Irish Short Stories
(1989). He has written plays for the stage and for radio and television; several of his television plays have been based on his short stories. Most of his books are available in Penguin.
In 1976 William Trevor received the Allied Irish Banks Prize, and in 1977 he was awarded an honorary CBE in recognition of his valuable services to literature. In 1992 he received the
Sunday Times
Award for Literary Excellence. In 1999 he was awarded the prestigious David Cohen British Literature Prize in recognition of a lifetime’s literary achievement. And in 2002, he was knighted for his services to literature.
Many critics and writers have praised his work: to Hilary Mantel he is ‘one of the contemporary writers I most admire’ and to Carol Shields ‘a worthy chronicler of our times’. In the
Spectator
Anita Brookner wrote, ‘These novels will endure. And in every beautiful sentence there is not a word out of place’, and John Banville believes William Trevor’s novels to be ‘among the most subtle and sophisticated fiction being written today’.
FELICIA’S JOURNEY
William Trevor
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published by Viking 1994
Published in Penguin Books 1995
27
Copyright © William Trevor, 1994
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted Lines from ‘Sentimental Journey’ by Bud Green, and Les Brown and Ben Homer, Warner Chappell Music Ltd, London WIY 3FA. Reproduced by permission of International Music Publications Ltd.
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-192888-3
For Jane
1
She keeps being sick. A woman in the washroom says:
‘You’d be better off in the fresh air. Wouldn’t you go up on the deck?’
It’s cold on the deck and the wind hurts her ears. When she has been sick over the rail she feels better and goes downstairs again, to where she was sitting before she went to the washroom. The clothes she picked out for her journey are in two green carrier bags; the money is in her handbag. She had to pay for the carrier bags in Chawke’s, fifty pence each. They have Chawke’s name on them, and a Celtic pattern round the edge. At the
bureau de change
she has been given English notes for her Irish ones.
Not many people are travelling. Shrieking and pretending to lose their balance, schoolchildren keep passing by where she is huddled. A family sits quietly in a corner, all of them with their eyes closed. Two elderly women and a priest are talking about English race-courses.
It is the evening ferry; she wasn’t in time for the morning one. ‘That’s Ireland’s Eye,’ one of the children called out not long after the boat drew away from the quayside, and Felicia felt safe then. It seems a year ago since last night, when she crept with the carrier bags from the bedroom she shares with her great-grandmother to the backyard shed, to hide them behind a jumble of old floorboards her father intends to make a cold frame out of. In the morning, while the old woman was still sleeping, she waited in the shed until the light came on in the kitchen, an indication that her father was back from Heverin’s with the
Irish Press
. Then she slipped out the back way to the Square, twenty-five minutes early for the 7.45 bus. All the time she was nervous in case her father or her brothers appeared, and when the bus started to move she
squinted sideways out of the window, a hand held up to her face. She kept telling herself that they couldn’t know about the money yet, that they wouldn’t even have found the note she’d left, but none of that was a help.
For a while Felicia sleeps, and then goes to the washroom again. Two girls are putting on deodorant, passing the roll-on container to one another, the buttons of their shirts undone. ‘Sorry,’ Felicia says when she has been sick, but the girls say it doesn’t matter. There can’t be much left inside her, she thinks, because she hasn’t had much to eat that day. ‘Take a drink of water,’ one of the girls advises. ‘We’ll be in in twenty minutes.’ The other girl asks her if she is OK, and she says she is. She brushes her teeth and a woman beside her picks up the toothbrush when she puts it down on the edge of the basin. ‘God, I’m sorry!’ the woman apologizes when Felicia protests. ‘I thought it was the ship’s.’
Typical of her to go out somewhere at a peculiar time like this, her father would have said when she wasn’t there to assist with the breakfast frying; typical of the way she is these days. He wouldn’t have found the note until he went in with the old woman’s breakfast. ‘She’s taken herself off,’ he’d have told her brothers and there wouldn’t have been time to talk about it before her brothers left for the quarries. She wonders if he went to the Guards; he mightn’t have wanted to do that in spite of everything, you never knew with him. But he’d have had to call in next door to ask Mrs Quigly to keep an eye on the old woman during the day, to give her her cream crackers and half a tin of soup at twelve, the way Mrs Quigly always used to when Felicia was still working in the meat factory.
Announcements are made. There’s a flutter of activity among the passengers, suitcases gathered up, obedient congregating in a designated area. A blast of cold air sweeps in when the doors are opened for disembarkation, and then the small throng moves forward on to the gangway. In the evening, when her father and her brothers had returned to the house, they’d have sat in the kitchen, with the note on the table, her father shaking his head slowly and mournfully, as if he in particular had been harshly treated: everything was always worst for her father. One of her
brothers would have said he’d go down to McGrattan Street to tell Aidan, and whichever one it was would have called in at Myles Brady’s bar on the way back. Her father would have cooked the old woman’s supper and then their own, stony-faced at the stove.
Felicia’s nervousness returns as she passes with the other passengers into a bleak, unfurnished building in which a security officer questions her. ‘Have you means of identification?’ he demands.
‘Identification?’
‘What’s your name?’
Felicia tells him. He asks if she has a driver’s licence.
‘I can’t drive actually.’
‘Have you another form of identification?’
‘I can’t think that I have.’
‘No letter? No documentation of any kind?’
She shakes her head. He asks if she is resident in the UK and she says no, in Ireland.
‘You’re here on a visit, are you, miss?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what’s the purpose of this visit?’
‘To see a friend.’
‘And you’re travelling on to where?’
‘The Birmingham area. North of Birmingham.’
‘May I look through your bags for a moment? Would you mind just stepping aside, miss?’
He pokes about among her clothes and the extra pair of shoes she has brought. She thinks he’ll comment when he comes across the banknotes in her handbag, but he doesn’t.
‘I’ll just jot down the address of your friend,’ he says. ‘Would you give me that, please?’
‘I don’t know it. I have to find him yet.’
‘He’s not expecting you?’
‘He’s not really.’
‘You’re sure you’ll find him?’
‘I will, through his place of work.’
Her interrogator nods. He is a man of about the same age as her
father, with a featureless face. He is wearing a black overcoat, open at the front.